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Thinking this through. The Penguin update does effectivley give this type of negative seo a platform. Further this form of negative seo in a post penguin envirnomnent would appear to be an easier method than trying to find good quality links. If you have good quality links and you can knock your competitors down then you move to the top more easily.

Now I am not suggesting I would do this but I am sure in this age there are likley to be some unscrumpulous companies that might employ (and possibly are) this tactic.

My question is more about given Google has efffectivley dumped this into our laps what would eveyone suggest you can do if you feel you are being targeted to try and stop and protect your brand and your rankings?

How will Google know who has posted the spammy links? How will Google believe us if we say we did not do that?

I am now undecided as to if the Penguin update was a really good move or poor thinking and implmentation by Google.

6 Responses

I do not believe negative SEO has a major impact on sites. I have experienced several sites that have had spam link attacks or links from dubious sources pointed at them and there has been no ascertainable negative impact on those sites. Google seems to identify these kind of attacks and does not give weight to them at all. If a site has a higher proportion of good quality natural links, then suddenly a spike of 'porn' links appears then it must be obvious to Google this is from a third party.

Saying that there has been instances where negative seo has worked on some sites, and post penguin there has been a lot of speculation and angst about negative seo.

I say don't worry, if you are building a clean, natural and high quality link profile and suddenly have a competitor try negative seo it's easy to spot.

I guess my concern is more if Google does not pick it up. I mean how would they know if I or someone else posted the spammy links?

Statistically yes if there was a spike I can see your point but if a competitor decided to have a sustainable negative campaign against my brand then this would be a different situtation.

In this case Google, because they dont know who is posting the links can only assume the owner of the domain is doing it and I think that is a major hole in the Penguin update.

In this case how do I prove my innocence to Google becuase they would judge me guilty and I would then have to find a way to prove my innocence. Inn the interim you would loose that traffic and revenue.

Usually Google passes no value through spam links and just doesn't count them at all, although post-penguin there is still speculation as to whether penalisations that occur to the low quality sites are passed on through the spammy links.

When the case arises, yes you cannot prove you didn't do it - but think about it if negative seo was really that easy then everyone would be doing it and investing in negative seo to get rid of competitors instead of building rankings.

Actually I think it would be very easy which is one of my greatest concerns.

If you do a Google search for seo companies in India you get a long list and you could easily find those would undertake a black hat activity and create spammy links unfortunatley very easily and for a relatively low cost.

What I would liket see if somethign from Matt Cutts on how they may address this issue.

I am currently experiencing something like this. Someone is taking our regular press releases, running them through a *terrible* spinner and posting them everywhere on really spammy sites. We've also noticed a ton of links popping up on porn networks all over the place. This has all happened in the last couple weeks. Since I'm the only one at the company doing SEO and link building I have to assume it's probably a negative seo effort on behalf of one of our competitors.

We haven't seen any hit to our rankings and in fact we are still increasing fairly steadily, but who knows what happens next month.

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